Twitter owner Elon Musk pays MrBeast $5 a month as part of a rolling social media subscription. This curiosity underscores the content creator’s continued global popularity reaching new heights, as evidenced by MrBeast’s incredible YouTube subscriber numbers.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known by his online nickname MrBeast, was a YouTuber for 11 years with his Let’s Play videos before branching out into increasingly extravagant ventures claim to fame. He’s performed stunts on multiple channels, from charities like building housing for the homeless to MrBeast’s real-life pure entertainment game Squid Game.
MrBeast recently decided to try out Twitter’s new content feed, and later reported that his subscriber list already includes Elon Musk. In an April 18 tweet, MrBeast joked that the fact that Musk now pays him $5 a month raises the question of “who is really in charge.” This isn’t the first time the YouTuber has shared such sentiments, as Musk himself has previously acknowledged MrBeast’s whimsical ambitions to become Twitter’s new CEO.
Musk decided to become one of MrBeast’s first Twitter subscribers, seemingly out of a desire to advertise the new feature. The feature, originally announced on April 13, allows users to subscribe to any type of material, from traditional newsletter formats to long-form videos and podcasts. The Twitter feed is just the latest attempt by Musk to more aggressively monetize the social media platform since acquiring it for $44 billion at the end of 2022. Those efforts started with the polarizing Twitter Blue subscription, which offers blue account verification tokens — among others — for $8 a month.
With nearly 20 million followers, MrBeast is currently one of the 100 most followed Twitter users, so he’s in an ideal position to spread word of mouth about the platform’s recently launched feed. While it remains to be seen whether he ends up using the feature more often, the tweet identifying Elon Musk as one of his subscribers has done a lot of publicity, being viewed more than 30 million times in 24 hours.
Time will tell what’s next for the famous content creator, especially since his popularity and ambitions have already begun to expand beyond YouTube and Twitter. This was underscored recently by MrBeast’s revelation that he was considering running for president once he turned 35, the earliest news that the U.S. Constitution allows him to run for president.